Fire and Ash

Benny looked past him at the open door. “What truth, Joe?”

The ranger said nothing.

“The Reaper Plague,” Benny said softly. “There are all kinds of theories about how it started. A new virus . . .”

“Radiation from a returning space probe,” said Nix.

“The wrath of God,” added Riot.

“Something that was accidentally released from a lab,” said Lilah.

Benny closed his eyes. “None of that’s true, is it?”

When he opened his eyes, he saw a look of such deep sadness on Joe’s face that it made his heart hurt.

“Before First Night,” said the ranger, “I spent my entire adult life working for a government organization that did only one thing: We hunted down the kinds of people who wanted to see the world burn. Terrorists, religious extremists, actual mad scientists, governments that had gone off the rails. Time and time again I led good men and women into battle to stop the release of a doomsday weapon. I won every single time. I lost a lot of friends along the way. I even lost the first woman I truly loved. My body’s covered with scars from injuries taken in the line of duty. Me and my guys, we were sometimes all that stood between the world and the end of everything. Sounds grandiose, right? But that’s how it was.” He sighed.

“You failed,” said Lilah. She made a statement of it, harsh and naked.

He raised his hands as if indicating the whole world. “Some people kept their secrets a little too long and a little too well, and by the time my team knew about it, the devil was already off the leash.” He shook his head. “That’s not an apology, and it’s not an excuse. I want us to understand each other. I’m a ranger. I do not work for the American Nation. I work with them. There are some good people helping to build a new government. But there are some people who still hold on to the old ways. Their religion is the cult of secrecy, and they are every bit as dangerous as Saint John and the psychopaths running the Night Church.”

“Why tell us all this now?” asked Benny. “What aren’t you telling us?”

“Benny,” cautioned Nix, but Joe shook his head.

“He’s dead right, honey. When we go into that hangar, you’re stepping outside of the world you knew and into a bad slice of the old world. They’re going to want to push you around. They’re going to try and close you out of their vault of secrets. You’re civilians and you’re kids and they believe that you don’t matter.”

Joe removed the slips of paper they’d gotten from Sergeant Ortega. “This is a different kind of currency, and down on the level of reality and sense, it’s worth a lot more than the secrets the people on this base are holding.”

He handed them to Benny.

“I told them that you had information about where Dr. McReady might be. They want that information very badly. They think that it’s your obligation to simply hand it over. If you do, they’ll kick you right back onto the other side of the trench. Don’t let them. This is your world. It was always yours. We didn’t have the right to break it, and we shouldn’t be allowed to keep any more secrets.”

The four of them stood there in front of Joe Ledger, weighing his words, reading the implications. Grimm licked his jowls and watched them.

Finally Benny said, “The Reaper Plague was no accident, was it?”

“No,” said Joe in a ghost of a voice. “We made the monster and we let it out of its cage.”

“Deliberately?” asked Nix, aghast.

His eyes were filled with great sorrow. “You ever heard of Friedrich Nietzsche?”

Nix nodded and in a small voice said, “I was just thinking about that earlier. ‘Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’ ”

“Exactly,” said Joe. “We stared into the abyss so long we liked what we saw. God forgive us all.”

58

JOE TURNED AND WALKED INTO the hangar. Grimm was right at his heels. Riot and Lilah exchanged a glance, then followed. Benny paused, touching Nix’s arm. He didn’t like the wild look in her eyes.

“You okay?”

“Oh, sure,” she said tightly. “I’m just fine. I shouldn’t even be surprised. After everything that’s gone on with Charlie and the Hammer, Preacher Jack, Mother Rose, Saint John . . . I don’t know why I don’t just give up on believing in people.”

“I know why,” said Benny.

She gave him a long, cold look. “Oh really? Why?”

“Because we’re people. Your mom was a good person who never hurt anyone. Tom died trying to help people. That guy George who spent all those years taking care of Lilah and her sister. The Greenman. Guys like Solomon Jones and Sally Two-Knives and everyone who helped destroy Gameland . . . they’re people. Eve is a person. So is Riot, and she was raised to be a monster. She left all that behind, and for the last few years she’s done nothing but risk her life to help people. They’re good people, and that’s what I believe in, Nix. That goodness exists and that it’s powerful. And I think that’s what you believe in too.”

She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against his chest. “But there are so many of them. Look at what they’ve done. They destroyed the whole world. . . .”

“No,” Benny said softly. He hooked a finger under her chin and gently raised her face. “Not the whole world. And not the best of it.”

Nix’s mouth trembled and she hung there at the edge of tears, pinned to the moment by the enormity of Joe’s words.

“I can’t live in a world like this,” she said. “I can’t live if everything’s broken and there’s only pain.”

“No,” agreed Benny, “neither can I. So let’s live in a better world than that.”

She suddenly wrapped her arms around him, and they clung to each other.

“Promise me,” she begged.

“I promise,” he said.

As he held her, Benny looked into that promise. It was a simple enough thing to say in the heat of heartbreak and tears. But he knew as he said it that this was going to mean more to him than anything else. Something shifted inside his head and his heart, like a switch being thrown on some machinery that had been carefully built but never turned on. He wasn’t sure, then or ever, what powered that machinery. Maybe love, maybe hate, maybe a moral outrage so hot that it caused gears to turn and motors to combust.

There are such moments in a life. Solitary seconds on which the reality of what life means pivots and turns from a dead end toward a road of untrodden grass that stretches on forever. It was a moment in which the words he said aloud and the whispers of his inner voice spoke in perfect harmony. And Benny knew thereafter that he would never hear that inner voice as a thing separate from himself. It was as if he had caught up to the idealized version of himself that had always walked a pace or two ahead.

I promise, was what he said.

I will, was what he meant.

59

THEY ENTERED THE HANGAR, WHICH was vast but mostly empty. Two big, black helicopters squatted on the concrete pad. Unlike the ones in the first hangar, these hadn’t been stripped of parts. They looked fierce and sinister and ready to growl their way into the air. Benny had read about helicopters and thought they might be Black Hawks, though this one had stubby wings as well as rotors, and he was pretty sure that some of the stuff mounted on those wings were chain guns and missiles. Part of him thought that they were pretty cool; but the other aspect of him—the facet of his personality that had just shifted into the forefront of his mind—viewed them merely as a tool. Potentially useful, but in no way designed for anything but destruction. Even if that destruction was necessary.

He thought about the phrase “necessary evil” and believed he understood it better at that moment than ever before. It was like the sword he carried. And that sparked a memory of something Tom once told him, an old samurai maxim that describes the apparent contradiction of those who prepare for war but do not crave it.

“We train ten thousand hours to prepare for a single moment we pray never happens.”

Benny nodded to himself.

Most of the hangar was in shadows. One corner was well lit, though, and it was occupied by a big metal folding table. A woman in a military uniform sat at the table, and she rose as Joe led them over.

“Kids, meet Colonel Reid,” said Joe. “She’s the base commander here at Sanctuary.”

Colonel Reid was a stern, unattractive woman roughly the size and density of a packing crate. She had iron-gray hair cut short, a lipless slash of a mouth that was compressed into a line of stern disapproval, and eyes that had all the warmth of frozen blueberries.

Despite his immediate reaction to her, Benny wanted to get this started on the right foot. He smiled and extended his hand.

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am. My name’s—”

“I know who you are, Mr. Imura,” she said, cutting him off sharply. She eyed the four of them with the disapproval of a disgruntled diner looking at side dishes she hadn’t ordered. “I know who all of you are.”

Joe sighed.

Benny’s hand hung for a moment in the air.

“Okay, taking it back,” he said, lowering his arm.

Reid eyed Joe. “What’s your new mission status? Child-care professional?”

Joe sliced off a wafer of a smile. “They earned their spot.”

Reid shook her head. “It’s on you, then. I don’t have troops to waste minding them.”

“We didn’t ask to be minded,” said Benny.

“Right,” said Nix, “I heard that four of your guys were in the infirmary.”

Reid’s icy expression dropped to absolute zero. “You have a smart mouth, girl.”

“And you have a—”

“Okay, enough!” roared Benny. “Everyone cut the crap.”

They all looked at him, momentarily shocked to silence.

“What the hell is it with everyone?” Benny continued, his volume lower but his voice still hard as fists. “If you’re mad at us for roughing up some of your soldiers, then too bad. Get over it. They could have acted like human beings instead of robots.”

“They were following my orders.”

“Then maybe you should start giving better orders,” Benny said coldly. “I mean, who do you think you are? Who do you think we are? We’re not on opposite sides in this thing. Unless I’m mistaken, it’s us against them, and the ‘them’ are the reapers and the zoms. We are supposed to be working together to save the world.”

“We are,” Reid fired back. “The American Nation is using its full resources to combat the Reaper Plague.”

Benny leaned on the edge of the table. “And me and my friends? We’re what to you? A nuisance?”

“I believe you already tried to play the card of importance due to finding the plane.”

Benny smiled. “Yeah, I thought I recognized your voice. That was you I talked to yesterday. You said that our finding the plane was only self-interest. Are you actually that dense? Are all you people that close-minded? We shared that information because that’s what people do. That’s how everyone survives. Maybe you haven’t been outside lately, colonel, but zombies ate the world. People have been scratching and clawing to survive for fifteen years. My own town is in California. Your jet passed right over us. Are you going to tell me that you didn’t see it? Are you going to tell me that you don’t know about the Nine Towns we have up in those mountains? Captain Ledger knows about them, so I’ll bet a brand-new ration dollar that you know about them.”

“We are aware of those towns,” conceded Colonel Reid. “What of it?”

“What of it?” Benny slapped the flat of his palm on the table so hard it sounded like a gunshot. Echoes banged off the hangar walls. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us? We thought we were alone all those years. We thought that the rest of the world was dead. Don’t you think it would have helped us to know that there were other people out there? That there was a new government? That scientists were working on a cure? That people were trying to put the world back together into some shape that made sense? Are you so removed from human emotions that you can’t realize how much that would have helped people? Helped us? It would have given us hope.”

Colonel Reid started to reply, but Benny wasn’t finished with her. “I read enough about the way things were before First Night to know that people were always fighting. Not just wars, but political fights, social fights, all sorts of things. I swear, sometimes reading those history books I wondered if people wanted to fight more than they wanted to survive.” He straightened and fixed her with a cold stare. “When we saw that jet, we thought that things were going to be okay. We thought that it represented a chance for a better future than the one we were handed. I can’t even put into words how sorry I am—how cheated I feel—to find out that things are just the same.”

The silence in the hangar was absolute.

Finally, Riot murmured, “The boy’s right . . . we’re up to our eyeballs in the alligator swamp and y’all won’t let us in the boat.”

Colonel Reid brushed nonexistent lint from her lapel. Nix balled her hands into little fists that she squeezed hard enough to make the knuckles creak.

In a calmer voice, Benny said, “Right now you need us.”

He produced the sheets with the coordinates.

Reid’s face went scarlet, and she wheeled on Ledger. “You said that you had the coordinates.” ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">